Showmen Sell It Hot #5

 

Showmen: Hondo and What Happened to 3-D TV's?, Plus The Sting

Glasses Given Out So Viewers Can Watch Once-Only 1991 TV Run of Hondo in 3D

Producing Partners John Wayne and Robert Fellows

HONDO (1954) --- Why did they take away 3D televisions? Were we being punished for something? There’s eerie effect to corporations that make a policy decision, all hands down with it. Guess I'm out of luck when my present 3D-enabled TV wears out. There are old sets at eBay and places, but I’m skittish where it comes to second-hand, especially where they travel through mail and you can’t be sure about proper packing of leviathan flat screens. I spoke with a prominent retailer and they said there were complaints about condition/quality and it was not worth the effort of fielding them. “Lack of content and waning consumer interest” are also said to have been factors for dropping the 3-D option. Projection TV with goggles give too dark an image like theatres when attempt was made to revive depth during the seventies and eighties. So why do I carp over 3D in a column about Hondo, when we can’t access Hondo on 3D anywhere? I’d like knowing why that is but must assume “consumer interest” is gone. Remember aberrant occasion when Hondo ran on 1991 television in 3D, some sort of tie-in with 7-11 stores? I didn’t watch for never much liking red-green specs. Hondo and Dial M for Murder are probably the best 3D features not taken up with monsters and spacemen. There was myth for years that because Hondo was released late in 1953, it played mostly flat for the fad having passed. Robert Furmanek and team debunked that, plus theatre-front evidence here suggests brisk business for Hondo at least at its Palm Theatre engagement. It was profitable for Warners and producing Wayne-Fellows. All-night shows at the Palms permitted closure from 6 am till 10:45 am. That’s punishing hours for anybody. Figure they had three shifts at minimum. Hondo like a number of westerns compared itself with great ones past, in this case The Covered Wagon, Red River, and Shane. The Covered Wagon by then would have been stuff of long-ago legend, but then again, it was only thirty years past, and that seems but blink of an eye. The ad's “New” 3D, seen through “Wonderful New Glasses” seems to acknowledge problems had with the old ones, and indeed they were not infrequently a problem. We may assume Slaves of Babylon was pretty punk after thrill of Hondo, Slaves flat and formulaic, but there was option to walk out, as many undoubtedly did after getting money’s worth that was Hondo.

The Sting Selling Hot with Poster Art by Richard Amsel

THE STING (1973) --- For a picture so celebrated in its day, I wonder how many under-sixties know from The Sting, let alone ever saw it or would be inclined to. Robert Redford recalled how he rented the video to amuse a grandchild staying over the weekend. To the elder’s embarrassment if not surprise, The Sting just lay there. Would it for other sharer’s offspring as well? The Sting needs concentration, over two hours of it, and I wonder if that’s beyond a viewership for whom any feature seems much for moderns to get through. Here was a Best Picture winner dubbed the perfect smart amusement, humor but with high stakes, a puzzle to flatter our attention and intelligence. Civilians say movies should just “entertain,” this to me implying that no film can satisfy beyond a humblest goal. The best films give joy measurable not just from a first time seen, but forward via memories and repeat looks where affection only grows. Do classics have a simpler definition? The Sting belongs to 1973 as does American Graffiti and Jaws to their respective years. I don’t know anyone who enjoyed these but have renounced them since, each pleasing to a level few features achieve then or now. I say this today but what of ten years hence with the seventies gone farther out with tide? We measure affection for 60’s features by how close a current generation embraces them at You Tube. YT deepest-dishers go back no further than The Godfather it seems, save for James Bond and scattered genre titles. 

Deliberate Retro Look for Art Inserts Throughout Credits and Body of The Sting

Give us another decade and chances are the eighties and nineties will predominate, that being but natural, say analysts. First responders to any popular culture take away most fervent love, but still I’d ask: Can anyone way back, since, or now, revere King Kong, Meet Me in St.Louis, or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon as certain ones among us do? For viewership in 1973, The Sting staged fiction set less than forty years prior, the mid-thirties within clear memory of many who saw the movie, a condition akin to us and something depicting the late eighties. Would that seem so profoundly distant as the era The Sting recreated? Time and change can convulse or barely register. We might say things are not so different as they were forty years ago yet argue life in a first couple months of 2020 was as it never would be again, for reasons obscure already to many that are younger. Everyone has their own idea of landmarks, assignment of same a matter of personal choice and circumstance. Universal’s Blu-Ray of The Sting has an hour-long documentary that was done in 2005. Almost all of principals, save director George Roy Hill, were still around and eager to talk. Now they’re pretty much gone, writer David S. Ward among survivors. I see he taught three courses at Chapman University in Orange, Ca. Does he still, at eighty, instruct hopefuls how to pen a script good as the one he did for The Sting? Is The Sting in 2026 a highest mark to aim at, or would students need to be acquainted with, then convinced of it as ideal distillation of story and characters? We speculate on present-day chance The Sting or something like it might have with studios, but look what’s become of studios, indeed Hollywood, both seeming now to sleep with fishes.

Foreign Art is Variation on Domestic Nostalgia Emphasis, but Note Flared, Low-Hanging Cuffs

David S. Ward is best recalled for The Sting, but gravy may have flowed more from Major League plus two sequels he penned. A surprising lot of writers (or should it surprise?) ended up teaching, presumed feathers in academia caps that hire them. It makes sense that writers would eventually teach others to write. How many great scripts does even a great talent have in him/her? Consider luck it needs for any newcomer to sell one, never mind more. Same with producers. Tony Bill from The Sting is still with us, him once male ingenue acting support, switched to producing where real success in Hollywood lay. Bill taught too, returned to acting, was known to help writing newcomers. He is eighty-five this year, reminder again of how long ago The Sting was. Astounding comeback the 1973 film enabled was for Scott Joplin, who unknowingly and seventy-five years earlier supplied music for The Sting. Success of the score was not quaint, retro, camp, or ironic, Joplin accompany a latter-day hit that needed no apology or explanation, being fresh as was heard and enjoyed during the nineteenth century. I wondered if Joplin was tabbed for films since The Sting and found but shorts, minor use here/there, but no showcasing like in 1973. Has opportunity been missed? Might illuminate to know how much Joplin generates in Spotify listens, other stream sources for music old and new. Are his themes used by those who score for silent features? I’d say they’re missing a bet if they don’t.